Drama/Theater

2013

Senior Class Play: Metamorphoses

JANUARY 2012

MWHS Performs The Mouse That Roared

Please click the image below to view a compilation of beautiful photos,courtesy of Robert Moses.

MAY 2011

MWHS Performs The Canterbury Tales

On Wednesday and Thursday, May 25-26, at Heberton Hall on Winter Street, Monadnock Waldorf High school presented its very first play production, and adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Written over 600 years ago, Canterbury Tales is one of the greatest poetic works in English by the greatest English poet prior to Shakespeare. Living in a time of linguistic transition known as Middle English, Chaucer was “the first finder of our language,” and instrumental in forging a new vernacular out of its Anglo-Saxon and French roots. From his writings he emerges as a poet of love, both earthly and divine, whose stories range from lustful cuckoldry to spiritual union with God. He writes about man's relation both to his fellows and to his Maker, while simultaneously providing entertaining views of the frailties and follies—as well as the nobility—of mankind. When Chaucer died in 1400, he became the first of England’s great men to be buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey—an extraordinary honor for a man of common birth. Two hundred years prior to the tales, knights of King Henry II slayed the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, as a result of struggles over secular and sacred political power. The bloody deed took place inside the cathedral itself. Instantly hailed a martyr, Becket was soon made a saint and his shrine became the holiest pilgrimage site in England, with many miracles attributed to it. In Canterbury Tales a group of twenty-nine pilgrims gather at an inn in springtime to start a journey to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury and, in order to pass the time, agree to engage in a storytelling contest as they travel there and back. Chaucer apparently planned 120 tales for his final masterpiece but completed only twenty-four. In the adaptation MWHS performed, eight pilgrims appeared telling seven tales. Karl Schurman